


We're the King and Queen of Everything, Including Broom Closets

by okaynowkiss



Category: The Magicians - Lev Grossman
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-22
Updated: 2014-12-22
Packaged: 2018-03-02 21:13:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2826287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/okaynowkiss/pseuds/okaynowkiss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set early in <i>The Magician King</i>, Janet and Eliot take a field trip down to Castle Whitespire's dungeons on a mini-quest for a mysterious door. The results are underwhelming.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We're the King and Queen of Everything, Including Broom Closets

**Author's Note:**

  * For [aurilly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aurilly/gifts).



Improbably enough, Castle Whitespire felt a little empty to Eliot in the days following Quentin and Julia’s departure for the Outer Island. Two people, even a king and a queen, wasn’t much of a difference when you were talking about a vast castle constantly thrumming with the activities of scores of staff, but Eliot felt the change keenly. The stone corridors echoed more and the temperature had dropped a few degrees—it was all in his head, he was sure, and far from disturbing him, that thought pleased him. He was in tune with the rhythms of Fillory in a way he had never expected to relate to anything in his life. And two of Fillory’s royal family were traveling, so it made sense that Eliot should feel off-balance. It was right, it felt fated and perfect, like so much of what happened in Fillory, and like so little of what happened on Earth ever had.

(If you’d asked him when he was younger, at Brakebills or in Oregon, if he’d one day feel basically at peace with himself and his place in life, Eliot would’ve laughed in your face. Actually, if he’d deigned to answer, he would’ve said he already was perfectly at peace, thank you very much, but privately he would’ve known that was a lie. He’d hoped he was biding his time, waiting for the right opportunity to present itself, that somewhere the universe was holding a table for him in a restaurant with three Michelin stars, but he’d assumed he was going to live out his days in the existential IHOP.)

Beyond the social contract of requiring fealty from your subjects, Eliot had wondered for a while if there wasn’t some actual magic that went along with the wearing of a crown. He brought this up to Janet at breakfast one morning a few days after Quentin and Julia left, in one of the lesser banquet halls, as she was picking at a particularly decadent fruit spread on a silver serving tray.

“Like blood magic?” she asked, pausing with a tangerine section raised thoughtfully. “Spells that require the blood of a king, that kind of thing?”

“I’ve never read one,” said Eliot, “but sure, why not? Do you think we’re made of different stuff, magically speaking, while we have the crowns?”

Janet raised an eyebrow delicately, to say that she certainly thought _Eliot_ thought he was. Which, she wasn’t wrong, so he shrugged one casual-silk-clad shoulder and took a sip of his tea.

But the thing was, Eliot hadn’t actually brought it up because he thought being a king changed something in him. He’d done it because it was obvious that for Janet, things hadn’t changed enough. She wasn’t unhappy exactly, Eliot didn’t think. But she was aware of the ways the restless parts of him had quieted since he’d been here, and he knew, because he knew her pretty well, that she couldn’t tell why her own spirit wasn’t similarly soothed.

It was more obvious, probably, now that it was just the two of them in the castle.

He couldn’t help but think of that first trip to the Neitherlands, and how only Janet’s body had rebelled against the shift.

“So what do you want to do?” Janet asked. “Let some blood, craft a specialized reveal to see what kind of juice we’re working with? I could get into that. Can’t hurt to know what we’ve got in the arsenal if things go sideways.”

“Sounds a little messy. Besides, if my blood is precious, I’d really like to hang onto as much of it as possible. No, I was thinking of something else. Do you remember when we first came here, and you made that poor groundsman give us a tour of the dungeons?”

“Oh,” Janet said, significantly, her interest piqued for the first time in the conversation. Eliot was talking about an enchanted door that had appeared at the end of a corridor underground, roughly below the kitchens, if his estimate was correct.

It was just after their triumphant return to Fillory: one of the castle’s groundsmen had been showing the new kings and queens around, and then suddenly this wrought iron door inlaid with crowns and swords had appeared in a previously blank wall, right before their eyes. “So, what’s the deal with that?” Janet had interrupted the groundsman’s tour-guiding to ask. But when the man turned, the door vanished. It seemed to only want to reveal itself to kings and queens. (Or, possibly, just not to that one man. But Eliot needed an angle if he was going to get Janet to play along and try to have an adventure, and this was as good as any.) It sounded sort of exciting, a mysterious disappearing door in a castle dungeon, but the truth was that in a land overflowing with magical wonders, some middling ironwork in what basically amounted to their basement didn’t really rate. So none of them had visited the disused dungeons since that first time, and the door was still a mystery.

“What do you say?” Eliot asked, a challenge in his voice. “A royal expedition downstairs?”

“It’s probably the only kind we can go on right now, that’s for sure,” Janet said. With Quentin and Julia gone, the pair of them were adhering to royal procedure with military strictness. They issued proclamations like clockwork, they met with lesser councils on a tightly regulated schedule, they greeted the citizens from their balcony each day just as they had always done. The mood in Fillory wasn’t bad, thanks to their devoted leadership, but the horror of Jollyby’s death was still fresh for Janet, although she was composed about it now. The crown had reached the limits of what it could actually accomplish on that front—the Fenwicks were suitably warned off and the Lorians convincingly claimed ignorance, so that particular story was going to have to play out in its own time. They always did eventually.

Janet must’ve seen through the premise of the dungeon thing to the part of Eliot’s motivation that was to cheer her up, but she didn’t seem to mind. She would allow the occasional show of concern, as long as you didn’t make a big deal of it. (Also, it probably helped that there was no one there to witness it.)

“We’ll go down today, then,” Eliot said. “What do you have on the docket for the morning?”

This allowed Janet to roll her eyes and go into an animated spiel that she clearly rather enjoyed. “You _know_ what I have on the docket because you _put_ it on my docket, and I’m not sure why I’m the one meeting with the talking animals again when that’s clearly a matter for _the High King—”_

So they fulfilled a few administrative duties and met up around lunchtime. Eliot had had a chef pack them a few light meals and some of the better not-quite-champagne for the event, because it was hard to estimate how long it was going to take to find and crack a mystery door. He carried this in a shoulder bag which he wore over his topcoat, because from what he remembered it was cold down there. Janet showed up similarly dressed for the elements and looking pretty chipper, which, for her, looked basically like determined and confident and like she knew a couple secrets about you.

They trooped down the little-used staircase for what felt like a mile, torches on the wall and a portable conjured light guiding them. They didn’t bother with defensive magic. It was hard to get worked up about the potential dangers. “My money’s on porn,” said Janet. “I mean, Fillorians have sex, obviously, but have you ever seen so much as a dirty cave drawing here? It’s suspicious. I bet a previous king outlawed sexually explicit media and locked it all up under the castle in a magically contained room, and that’s what we’re going to find.”

“That’s too interesting, we’re not going to be that lucky. Besides, have you not seen the tapestry in my dressing room? It’s tasteful... but if lewd images were banned they would’ve burned that ages ago. It’s probably more of a portal than a room, like, a shortcut from one side of the castle to the other, accessible only to royalty.”

“You’re right, that would be boring. You know, it’s probably just full of cleaning supplies or something, and somebody put a concealment spell on the door as a joke.”

They traded increasingly banal scenarios the rest of the way down, and the pair of them were in good spirits when they walked the row of cells that led to the mystery door’s wall. The whole wing must have been built by an earlier, less benevolent ruler—none of the Brakebills had ever sentenced anyone to imprisonment.

The wall looked as ordinary as either of them remembered, and when the door didn’t blip into existence, they spent a moment of sort of humorous concentration regarding the blank slab of stone. Janet cleared her throat and began to work a couple of reveals, her fingers moving nimbly. Magic crackled in the dim corridor, throwing shapes onto the wall. And then she tried it again, because they were underground in Fillory and that meant the grammar of the spells had to be adapted in unpredictable ways to account for the different circumstances.

But it was no good. Eliot took a stab at it next, declaring himself and Janet, and imploring the wall to give. They could’ve smashed it by brute force with no trouble, probably, but sometimes that had a bad effect on things that weren’t currently physical: you could get permanently locked out of a piece of magic by wrecking the surrounding area.

They broke to eat after a couple hours of creative solutions that didn’t work, and when they’d finished off a bottle of not-champagne between the two of them Eliot suggested they get back to it.

But Janet shook her head. She eyed the shackles on the ground next to where she and Eliot were picnicking and collected her thoughts. “I don’t think there’s anything to be found here. There’s no trace of magic on that wall. The door moved if it was ever here.”

Eliot shrugged. “So we’ll find it. It’s our castle, it’ll bend to our will eventually.”

“I know you think I’m sad about this, but I don’t care,” Janet said, not unkindly. “Honestly, I only wanted to come search for the secret room because it seemed important to you. I’m having fun. I’m a goddamn queen of Fillory, Eliot. I like ruling.”

He smiled crookedly at Janet, his oldest friend, who was always brave and always kept herself together. “It’s just that I think you like it as much as you ever liked anything,” Eliot said. Like Manhattan, he meant. Like Brakebills.

“Well, so?” Janet fished a second bottle of champagne out of the bag and uncorked it. “I’m not like you and Quentin. I wasn’t waiting for something the way you guys were.”

And the thing was, Eliot couldn’t tell if it was true or not. Was Janet so good at protecting her innermost heart, the vulnerable center of her, that there wasn’t a single chink in her armor? Or was there no armor at all, and the truth of her was that she was, basically, happy?

It was possible that Janet didn’t know, herself. If she had problems, she seemed to have an effective strategy of not thinking about them much.

In any case, they proceeded to get day drunk in the gloomy dungeon cell they were occupying before it was time to return to the business of the realm. The castle was built on a clockwork foundation, which allowed its towers to spin gradually over the course of a day. It also, underground, had the effect of creating an unnerving constant source of noise. A distant ticking and grinding through the thick walls. Eliot figured if you were locked up down here, you'd go mad hearing it all the time.

“You know, I think we should start using these cells again,” Janet said, reclining on one of the lonely wooden benches that Eliot supposed served as prisoners’ beds, a bottle dangling elegantly from her hand. “I mean, we’ve got no penal system to speak of.”

“There’s also not a lot of crime,” Eliot pointed out. “…At least, people tend to kill each other when they’ve disagreed, not take each other to court.”

 “You must be joking. I’m due to listen to a bunch of whiny dryads complain about satyrs encroaching on their territory in about two hours. It’s a standing appointment, they’re in here once a week.”

“Yeah? You want to throw ‘em in a cell for a couple days, send a message?”

“Tempting, but I think if we were going to send a message we’d use stocks in the village square. These are more for political prisoners. You know, someone we’re trying to grill for information or something. I should’ve brought back a few Lorians to make a point.”

Eliot stood and dusted himself off. He’d been sitting on a finely sewn blanket, their regular picnic setup, which he repacked now along with the remains of their meal.

“Ready, Your Highness?” he asked Janet, and offered a hand to help her up.

She took it and pulled herself up from the bench. “Ready, Your Highness.”

They walked hand in hand back the length of the corridor. Eliot had the sense that there was a change on the horizon for Janet, whether or not she was waiting for it. Whatever it was, it would probably have little to do with Eliot, and that was okay. If she was happy, he was happy.


End file.
